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I show that the labor
market increasingly rewards social skills. Between 1980 and
2012, jobs with high social skill requirements grew by nearly 10 percentage
points as a share of the U.S. labor force. In contrast, math-intensive but less social jobs
(including many STEM occupations) shrank by about 3 percentage points over the same
period.) Employment and wage growth was particularly strong for jobs requiring high
levels of both cognitive skill and social skill. To understand these patterns, I develop
a model of team production where workers “trade tasks” to exploit their comparative
advantage. In the model, social skills reduce coordination costs, allowing workers to
specialize and trade more efficiently. The model generates predictions about sorting and
the relative returns to skill across occupations, which I test and confirm using
data from the NLSY79 and the NLSY97. Using a comparable set of skill measures and
covariates across survey waves, I show that the labor market return to social skills was
much greater in the 2000s than in the mid 1980s and 1990s.

Many restaurants have implemented self-order
technologies across online and offline channels. Online technology, through
websites and mobile apps, allows customers to order and pay before coming to
store; offline technology, such as self-service kiosks, allows store customers
to place orders without interacting with a human employee. In this paper, we
develop a stylized theoretical model to study the impact of self-order
technologies on consumer waiting time, employment levels, and restaurant
profits. This is joint work with Fei Gao.